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Friday, August 10, 2007

Farewell for the weekend...

Here's my weekly "farewell while I do weekend things" post. I woke up with a gawd-awful sleep hangover this morning. I apparently slept on my head last night because my neck feels as if I've been playing Twister with it.

So, what to post, what to post....

Books!

I finished Philip Roth's The Dying Animal early in the week or late last week. Can't remember. Time flies when you're planning courses and reading erotica.

Anywho, The Dying Animal is another stunner from Roth. It's told from the perspective of David Kepesh, one of Roth's most famous and enduring characters, to an unnamed person who only speaks at the end of the novel. It's a chronicle of his relationship with a student, Consuela, with whom he becomes quite obsessed. Obsession is something foreign to Kepesh, a notorious bachelor and lover of sex. The novel is a chronicle not only of their affair, but also Kepesh's realization of his mortality. The title is a hint at the various layers of the text and is an allusion to his dying sexuality, his waning manhood, his mortality, and mortality in general, as Consuela's fate is not terribly sunny.

It's just a fantastic, multi-faceted, thoughtful text. While T. assures me that the Kepesh in The Breast and The Professor of Desire is quite a different incarnation, I'm excited to read those books just to see what Roth has up his sleeve. He's a shifty one, and I love it.

Reading now:Unmasqued, an erotic retelling of The Phantom of the Opera, by Colette Gale.

Up next:Eclipse, by Stephenie Meyer

And in a bit of a sad twist of fate, since I'm teaching the Monday night class from 6:00-8:30, I won't be able to attend the face-to-face book club I'd planned to join. I just hope maybe I'll have a chance in the Spring when my schedule changes.

5 comments:

Sounds like it's going to be an Eclipse weekend for several of us bookish bloggers!

I have a couple of Roth's books but have yet to read any. I haven't been reading a lot of contemporary adult fiction this year. Such a shame. I think I have The Human Stain, American Pastoral, and The Plot Against America. Maybe before the end of the year I'll get to one of them.

After Human Stain and The American Pastoral I have taken a hiatus on Roth. While the writing is beautiful with an air of solemnity, it takes a lot our of me--reading can be strenuous. But "waning manhood and dying sexuality" gets my attention so I might pick it up sooner than I have anticipated to read Roth again. :)